Hard to say that it's a mistake that like a lot of brands could make, like a lot of organizations could make. And so you look at something like that and. But man, what an impact, right? All of a sudden you're losing. You've got people with people with guns shooting at, shooting up cases of Bud Light. You got Kid Rock coming out saying he's never going to drink it again or whatever you have.
And then you lose your, you lose your ranking as the top beer brand of the country to, to Modelo, which not an American company, right? So we in America, we like to have our, we like our beer dominance in America and guess what? Or not, we don't have it. So, yeah, a lot of things like that. It's, you never know where it could come from. Mmm, that's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew. And I'm your host, Brett Dyster.
And if you could please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps. Leave. A five star review really does help with the rankings. Let me know how I'm doing. But this week we're going to be talking about crisis communication. The thing that nobody wants to go through, but we'll all eventually, if we're a business, go through because we're human, we make mistakes, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. It's going to happen. With me is John here.
And he brings more than 35 years of extensive experience in strategic communication and marketing, specializing in guiding businesses and executives through complex challenges. As the founder of David PR Group, a distinguished boutique consulting firm, John has carved a niche in shaping personal and corporate brands, particularly under high stress situations. But with that. Welcome to the show, John. Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here. You're welcome.
And the first question I ask all my guests is, are you a coffee or tea drinker? I'm a coffee guy. I'm a coffee guy for sure, 100%. I've never been a tea guy. I'm not anti anything. I just, I'm just more of a coffee person. Tried my, recently tried the pour over coffee. Somebody told me I should try that and it's like, it's kind of like a sort of Zen aspect of taking your time to make something. Enjoy that. On occasion it does.
It takes about, I would say three to four minutes to actually brew it up. But you do, if you get good coffee, you do taste more of the coffee through the pour over method. Absolutely. I've. I'm far from an expert, but I'm a. I'm a big process person, so I like process to. I like to do. I like, I like things with steps and process and variables and all that. So it's always, it's for, it's. And it's a nice break. I'm a work from the home office guy, so it's also a nice break.
Coffee break, Take a little extra time, spend a moment, focus, Step away from the daily grind. No pun intended. Yeah. And if you actually want to try like a cold version of it, it's called a Japanese pour over. We actually put ice at the bottom and you do the same thing. It just cools it instead of hot. Oh, okay. I have to research that one. All right. And with that, I gave a brief summarizing of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do?
Sure. I've been a public relations consultant for 35 years, my whole career. I started off as working for an agency in Florida. I did my intern before that on Capitol Hill. I worked in a US Senator's press office and kind of saw how the media world worked from that way. And then I started representing clients. And I've been on my. Had my own consulting business for 25 years, something like that.
And I began my career as a traditional publicist getting media coverage for my clients back when it meant something to put somebody in a newspaper, booking people on cable TV shows and with all those sorts of things. And then now the media landscape has changed dramatically since then. I still do some traditional publicity work, but focus on other areas of marketing. And one area that I still do a lot of work in is crisis communications.
I have a couple of clients that are close, like have ongoing, ongoing engagements with because they, they have things happen in their, in their business that they have to deal with. And then at the same time, I've done it over my career, worked with a lot of clients who've been in, in difficult situations. And how do you navigate that? How do you work your way through that?
And every situation is a little bit different, but that's a major focus of my business is dealing with clients and companies that are dealing with communications crisis. How do we distinguish it? Because I actually went to school for PR and when I took the crisis comm class, there was, it. There was a difference between an issue and a crisis.
And there were, and they were different because a lot of times we're in this hyper, like, dramatic time of social media where everything's a crisis, but is it really a crisis? So how do you, how do marketers and PR people understand the difference? Because there is a distinct difference so specifically between a. You say a crisis and an issue. That's the question. Yeah, yeah. I think crisis is probably in the, in the. And an issue might be more of a long term, a long term concern.
I look at it that there are different types of, that a crisis is relative. I, the. I've been trying to build out my own kind of continuum that goes from embarrassing to exasperating to existential. And so you have. Every organization has what might be a small thing for one type of. One business could be a huge thing for another. And the example I give all the time is if you're, you're burger King or McDonald's or in and out for you on the west coast, right? There's.
And you have a problem in your restaurant. There's a, whatever a mouse runs across the floor in your restaurant. For a big chain, that's embarrassing, right? That happens. If there's a rodent problem in a chain restaurant, that's a, that's an embarrassing problem. If there's, if that happens at your local delicatessen, your local bakery, your local family mom and pop Italian restaurant, that could be existential.
Because if you're, you may not, you may decide I'm not going to go to burger King or McDonald's or whatever in my neighborhood for a while till I forget about this. But you may never go to. Back to the local mom and pop place. So it's all relative. Like the same issue could kill one business. It would just be a blip for another. So there's, I mean that, that's really the main thing.
I think every business, it has to be aware of what can happen and how they can be impacted by something that happens. That's either sometimes it's in their control and sometimes it's not in their control. And that's the. And they have to be prepared, prepared to deal with it. Most companies, if they're in the like the service sector, professional service sector, for example, financial institutions, anybody that handles money, you have to worry about if there's some type of financial malfeasance.
And how do you handle that? As it might be okay to say to turn things over to the authorities when there's a problem, but people worry a lot about their money. So there's data privacy is another one. How do you handle that? When, if you're touching people's data, you have a lot of regulatory requirements and also.
But then there's breaches, there's hacks as we're recording this, there's a major hack going on in the automotive industry that's shut down a bunch of car dealerships around the country. I don't know if you've seen that or not. Those are. All right now there's a bunch of car dealers who are trying to figure out how to handle the fact that they can't write deals the way that they normally do. And they have to.
And you have at the same time CNN publishing stories saying it's not really a good time to buy a car because the car dealers are all shut down, which is not really true. They're not shut down. They're just being hampered a little. So it's all relative. No, I actually haven't heard about that one. I knew about all the other crises between Boeing and Bud Light. Bud Light's probably one of the bigger ones of the. Stepping into it and not really figuring out how to step out of it gracefully.
Yeah, no, that's the thing is like, those are types of things. Now. The Bud Light is one that's really interesting because what they were trying to do is get more folks like you and me to buy their beer, right? And so they're trying to expand. And what their idea was, let's grow the tent, right? So let's go after a bunch of social media influencers and try to grow our tent.
And remember, every big business like that, they're under tremendous pressure to increase sales and grow their market share. And so they're under the. So they're being encouraged to do more and reach out to more groups. And the. What happened with Bud Light was somebody said, let's try this, this, let's do this, let's do this little stunt. But they, what they ended up doing was completely misreading how their brand is viewed by their core audience. And they.
And it's hard to say that, that it's a mistake that like a lot of brands could make, like a lot of organizations could make. And so you look at something like that and. But man, what an impact, right? All of a sudden you're losing. You've got people with people with guns shooting a case, shooting up cases of Bud Light. You got Kid Rock coming out saying he's never going to drink it again or whatever you have.
And then you lose your, you lose your ranking as the top beer brand in the country to, to Modelo, which not an American company, right? So we in America, we like to have our. We like our beer dominance in America. And guess what? Or not, we don't have it. So, yeah, a lot of things like that. It's. You never knew where it could come from. A little bit of a Bud Light was that, yeah, they didn't really understand their core audience. They stepped in it because they were.
The marketing executive on an interview said that they didn't like their core audience. And I'm like, I saw the interview and I was like, what are you doing? Like, this is just not helping your situation. You're already in trouble, and now you're making fun of your core audience. I'm like, that's not how you bring back your core audience anymore. You just lost all your core audience for maybe a very small minority of customers.
Now, I get it that you want to expand your customers, but I think some businesses need to understand, like, where not to step in it between the two paradigms, because Bud Light is mostly conservatives and normal people usually get it. And so when they used Dylan Mulvaney as an influencer, they should understand that a lot of, A lot of those normal people don't like that type of thing. And it really rubbed them the wrong way. And it was more of what they did.
So they're like, happy first day as a woman. And so now you're just pissing off women because it's. Wait a minute here. Yeah, it's a, it's still, it's a great case study. It's a great case study because again, like I said, they're under tremendous pressure to expand, to have a bigger tent, to have more people. And so there. And at the same time, the things that. What do you know Bud Light for?
When you think about Bud Light, aside from the fact if you drink it or not, but you think about, you think about the, the commercial campaigns of over the years of the WhatsApp one and the. And the Dr. Glacowitz and all that stuff, and all the great commercials that they ran. Super bowl commercials. Guess what? Super bowl commercials don't the Super Bowls once a year. Right. First thing. And the. You're. You get less impact from.
From, from traditional commercials than you have in the past because people are not watching television the way they used to watch them. Now we're still out watching. The core audience for Bud Light is still watching live sports for sure. But if you're trying to expand again, you have to go, where are you going to go? You're going to go look for influencers on Instagram, TikTok and all that stuff. And I guess they made a mistake. They didn't think it through. They didn't put Dylan on.
They did not put Dylan in a campaign on national tv, in a Super bowl commercial. All they did was send a customized can to this, to, to Dylan. So there it's, it's an example of how somebody can really get hold, go viral and have a major impact. It's one we'll be studying for a long time.
Yeah, I think that one and also the Boeing one, I think the Boeing one's gonna be studied for a long time too, because Boeing I, for all intents and purposes, it seems like they knew that they were not doing things correctly and they just, we gotta get planes out type of a thing. That's from just an outsider perspective. I don't know what happened internally. I think I, I wrote a blog, I wrote a blog post recently about it that I think it's. I think Boeing's in an existential crisis.
I think that there, that it's much that between what happened because I wrote a blog, a blog post years ago, several years ago about how I thought they were really in trouble after the, the 737 Max incident. And what, and the way that they, the way that that thing came to pass, essentially they, that they were create. They put these iterative designs in the 737. They made, they redesigned this plane, essentially. They didn't teach the guys who were flying it how to fly it properly.
And people died. Right. And, and then now you have. What's this? When you're in an airplane, I don't know about you, but it's like what I here's, I'm most concerned at landing and takeoff, right? And then you sit there and you're sitting on an airplane. If you're, if your mind is wandering, you're going, what the hell would happen if that door opened right now? That's like the number three thing, right, that you worry about with an airplane. Aside from.
Because the most dangerous time is takeoff and landing. 1 and 2 take off and landing in the middle of the plane. You're like, oh, what if something hit this plane? What if this, what if a window opened? Would I get sucked out? And holy cow, it happens. And then why does it happen? Why does it happen? Because of the way that they build planes now, which again, existential. And, and the fact that they're just not. They weren't following their own safety protocols.
So I think that they've got a huge problem and I think it's. And it's, I'm sure it's impacting them because I know that there's A lot of people who are not. Who are because it's so confusing. All the different models of airplanes. I'm going to California next. I'm flying to California next week and I purposely booked on non Boeing airplanes because I don't, I just don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want to try to figure it. I don't have to figure it out. I don't want to.
Okay, is it max 7, max 9, 10, whatever. They're all 737 somethings. They got a big problem on their hands. Yeah. It's almost like how camera companies name their cameras. It's always so confusing. And you're like, I have a Panasonic S5 Mark 2X and it's dude, seriously, can you name them better? Sure. No, absolutely. There's a whole maybe it's funny when you see like what Tesla's doing with their, their rockets. It's like Dragon one and whatever, Dragon two. Maybe they're onto something.
It's like just something you can easily remember. Easily remember. It's the, it's why we go with why car names seem to be, seem to be simplifying too. Less, you know, corporate naming is a whole other issue. But yeah, no, I think that there's the but when it comes to but I. But see those are like the biggies, right? Like Bud Light's one of the biggest ones. Boeing's one of the biggest current ones. And the thing is that most companies, they need to think in terms of okay, what am I going to.
Number one, can you prepare for it? And the answer is yes. I think the biggest thing is that you have a crisis communications plan in place and it doesn't have to be a massive binder filled with information. It can be just the basics of here. If there's something happens, here's who our spokesperson is, here's who our key. Here's who are. Here's our key decision makers. The typical. The company is the brain trust, right. And then you know how you're going to communicate.
Make sure you have everybody's information so that it. So that if. So that you can get. You have, you know, everybody's cell phone or what Everybody's information. What so it's. They're easy if in case of something goes awry. And then having some policies in place. If you don't already have a media policy in place with your company, you should have one. It's a very simple concept. I always recommend to my clients that they put a media policy in with Their. With their employee manual.
And that media policy just says that the. That employees are not to act as spokespeople, not to speak on behalf of the company. That they're. If some. If someone reaches out to them from a media outlet or from even a infl. Influencer that they should contact somebody, the communications people at your company or the owner of the company, whatever size of your business is or your outside consultant to field inquiries from other. From outsiders. And that you're not a spokesperson. You don't.
Don't. Some guy comes up to you and wants to interview you on behalf of. As a member of your company, your answer is no. I. That's not my job. But I'll put you there. I'll give you a. I'll give you. I'll connect to the right person. So having a media policy in place that lays everything out and then thinking and planning and doing some brainstorming and some gaming out. Okay, here's what could happen to our company that would really, you know, that could happen. That's out of our control.
That we could. That we should be prepared for. And it's a lot of. And it's. For most businesses it's fairly straightforward. It's. You have aside from the traditional like natural disaster things that happen in different parts of the country, whether it's whatever a wildfire in California or it's a hurricane in Florida or it's a snowstorm in upstate New York. But you also have data breaches which are very common these days. You have financial issues. Sometimes employees do the wrong thing.
Sometimes people take money, sometimes things happen. And then sometimes you have a major crisis that is like out of your control workplace violence. I have unfortunately had a. One of my clients, they had. There was a violent crime that happened right outside the door of their business and they. To. To one of their clients or one of their customers. It's terrifying. And so what do you do? How do you handle that? What's the plan?
And so you can create a communications plan to prepare yourself to. If something, if something happens. Yeah. And talking about the crisis plan back when I actually had to take a class when I was going through my degree to actually write it and we had to do it back. Big binder full of stuff.
So should we modernize it and should we actually think about make maybe making like a short or a TikTok reel like pre prepared just in case one of these things happens so you can send it out pretty quickly or should we just stick to the more tried and true. Just have them Feel it. Because I feel like with this virality of everything, it almost seems like you need to get ahead of it with actually having pre prepared videos already ready to go. It's interesting.
I don't know if you can, if you could do that in the sense of figuring out like thinking about what the worst case scenario is and being able to produce a video in advance of that, but having the ability that you know that where you can, where you could quickly film such a thing. Right. Or that you have the distribution channel figured out in advance and you say, do I do a binder, do I do a spreadsheet, do I do a Google Doc or whatever. I think it's whatever your company culture, whatever works.
I think everything's gonna be digital. These days. I'm in South Florida, so I'm always worried about hurricanes and the power goes out and we haven't had, we haven't dealt with that in a while. And this was the one. The beauty of the, the beauty of the cloud is that it's backing everything up. But the downfall of the cloud is that it needs electricity to run it. And, and so there's a lot of, there's a lot of issues.
You want to make sure, okay, in your worst case scenario, in your crisis situation, is it, are you going to be able to, is everybody be able to read that Google Doc? The answer is probably, yeah, but, and then, but what do you, who's your spokesperson going to be and who's going to approve the message? And then listen, you're, you and I are making a video right now. It's not, I am neither, neither of us is Ryan Gosling, but we could all make, we could make a, we can make a video, right?
That's easy enough to do to get that sort of authentic communication out, but preparing and having, figuring out that figuring the distribution system out is probably the most important thing because you can't necessarily get the message right until it's happening. Yeah, I agree. You're actually flying to where I'm at in California and we have wildfires, we have winds, we now unfortunately have homeless and crime is pretty out of control.
So we have a lot of those other issues to deal with and businesses are trying to pivot because theft is a big issue in California. There's no way around it. Shrink is out of control and it's, you can't really prepare a crisis plan for it because someone steals something, it's on the news and you're like, I, I, that's out of my control type of a Thing, it's. The state government needs to step up or the local government needs to step up and start policing that. But even then they.
In California, they just write it off as whatever. And so it becomes this thing where even crisis cannot actually help you. Yeah, you have the. For this. It's all about. You have. That's a. That becomes a safety concern. And that's a true. That's a tricky one. How do you make sure the. You want to make sure that your store is safe, but you also don't want to have it. But you also don't want a metal detector for your client, your customers to go through. Right. You don't want it.
In other words, then no one's going to come. So you've got to figure out that it's a tricky one and it's tough. There's obviously a lot of big businesses are leaving San Francisco. I'm not sure where are you located? No, I'm not in San Francisco. I'm in Orange county, south of LA in Southern California. But there's. I know that's. There's been businesses that have those issues. There was an. There was a. Not a business. There was a guy. There was.
There's a video that's out that's been getting a lot of play lately of one of these porch pirate guys essentially stealing a package. Like the moment after the FedEx guy puts it on the person's porch. I don't know if you saw that one still. I've some folks wondering if it was real or not, but it looks pretty real. It's like, how do you prepare for that? I don't know how you prepare your business for people to come in and rob you or whatever. It's really difficult. And. But if it make.
But if you have an unsafe environment, it's really. It's tricky and you have to be thinking about what to do if something really bad happens. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where you, you can only prepare for so much. And for example, the hacking. The hacking is just now going to be. Anybody's going to get hacked. It's not if it's when you're going to get hacked. Unfortunately, I was. I used a password management system called LastPass and they got hacked majorly.
And they didn't have the best protocols and I had to deal with it. And it was pretty bad where someone. Yeah, someone bought something through my Amazon. I luckily said they were running late and I was like, I didn't. And it was going to Florida. I'm Like I'm not even in Florida. Like, how did this happen? And I had to go through like several different things just to fix it. Yeah, no, it's bad. There's the, there's a whole, there's a whole world out there of this cybercriminals and everything.
And how, and that's the thing is that you have to be. Eventually what happens is, I'll tell you. My, my, My wife had a similar issue and she had a couple of store cards. So she had cards from a big box retailer and she had a store card from a department store. And they were. Somebody went into this big box retailer and said that. They said they were my wife and they said that they wanted to buy a few iPhones and. But I need, I don't have my, my card with me.
Can you look up my card number, my store credit card number? And, and they did. And they put four iPhones on, on, on my wife's credit card for her from the big box retailer. And the, the, the crazy thing was she called it in, they took the charges off, they said we'll send you a new card. And then a week later it happened again before the new card even arrived. The person just went in, brazen person went in, impersonated my wife and again bought a bunch of iPhones at this big box retailer.
And so what she did was cancel her account. She basically said, I'm not going to, I'm getting rid of my store card. I'm not going to, I'm not going to. I'm not. It's not worth it to have it. And think about that. What's the value of the store credit card business in America? And it's huge. And if people stop trusting you to, to, to trusting your information, you have a big problem on your hands. So those are all things that you have.
That, that, and they know it, the retailers know it and they have to communicate that because if not then they're going to lose a huge segment of their business because where they make, where these companies are, they've, they're losing business to, to Amazon. But one of the word, one of the places they're making it is because they, you can still go to, to, to Best Buy or Lowe's or Home Depot and you can still finance that $1200 refrigerator and they make a lot of money off of that.
But if they don't trust, if you don't trust that best buyer, Home Depot or Lowe's or whoever is going to be use your data, then you're not going to hold that card. Yeah. Because even me, I went, I basically canceled LastPass and went to somebody else. I think I eventually landed on Proton Pass because they're open source and they are like the like privacy company right now. And they had a good deal where I was like, it was like a dollar a month and forever, as long as I keep on paying for it.
And I was like, that's the best deal I'm ever gonna get. Yeah. The thing is that there, there's, I. It's funny you say, okay, if I was a bad guy and I wanted to get a bunch of passwords, where would I go? I go to the password company then. And then if I was gonna open a password protection company, I better be sure that I'm like that I'm the digital, the digital Fort Knox, as it were. But you have, that's a big thing. Data breaches are a big thing because it erodes trust.
And then when it erodes trust, it erodes, it takes away from business. So you have to be prepared to communicate what you're doing about that these days. There's a lot of regulatory stuff involved. I've learned about data breaches and that you have to communicate that. And most of the companies, organizations have that now baked into their processes because it's so frequent. But you can always do more.
And then the other issues that impact people, like you said, are the, I think you said shrinkage, which is what the re. The retail term for, for staff, for theft. And also when you have insider problems in your company, employees. When you have employees, you have risk because employees sometimes can figure out ways to make things disappear from the company, either from either physical items or that they're embezzlement issues. And they happen, it happens at every type of business all the time.
And there's. And so you have to be prepared for that. And because again, people are concerned about their, about their money. Those are all issues that you can look at your business and make sure that you're at least thinking ahead enough, be prepared. And then if it gets, if it starts to get crazy, then, you know, then you have to be prepared on what to do to handle the fallout from that. And that's the type of work that, that we do.
Yeah, it's crazy because when I worked as a, in retail for Circuit City, they're no longer, they are back only as an online only. But I remember them. I bought a TV from them a long time ago. But I used to remember that the stats were. You always got like people would Steal within the company. So your employees would be the most. The ones that would steal the most. I think that's completely changed now where it's, it's not the employees anymore.
It's now the outside forces stealing the most now because of societal changes or whatever now. So it's almost because most businesses would prepare, they would have a budget for shrink. And now I don't think they can even budget that anymore because it's. I don't know how much I'm going to lose this year. Yeah, no, I think it's. You're right. There's. You still. Every once in a while you hear about somebody who goes in and robs a bank. Right.
But for the most part, bank people are robbing banks all day long with their, with their keyboards, with phishing scams. And they're doing it in incredibly creative ways with really under and big, much bigger fish. They're not stealing, they're not going and getting 10 grand out of the bank, out of the bank vault. They're getting hundreds of thousands of dollars by diverting wire transfers and things like that. And the, those are, those are real, real issues that again, that erode confidence.
And you have to try, you have to deal with that and maintain that confidence. And then the other thing is it can blow up and turn into a much bigger thing. It can turn into a much larger problem that can have a really detrimental effect on a business. How do PR people, like, do their best to figure all this out? Because you could write a crisis plate and then a new crisis comes up and you're like, I had no idea this was going to happen. So how do you prepare for the most part, for most of it?
Because you can prepare for most of it. There's just some things you're never going to be able to prepare for. Yeah, I think it's all. Everyone's. Every craze is always a little bit different. And then the question of where and how is the information, how is information getting out? And that's the big. That's the. And then will this. So a lot of times I get calls from my clients. They say, this just happened. We're not sure. We just want you to be aware.
And I'm like, okay, so now I know, now I know it's there. And then I start to game it out of my head. Okay, what would we say if this happened? If this happened? Right? And then sometimes it's, yeah, this happened. And there's a TV reporter here who's filming it, filming what's going on or they're calling and they want to know what our stance is on X, Y or Z. And so then you have to go into, go into, into an action mode. And then the other thing, the other issue, that's really what's tricky now.
There's a couple of things that I've seen a lot lately, and one is just misinformation or bad information and that you have folks who are who, you know. So you're saying you, you went to, you got a degree in pr, you get in a, through a journalism program, more than likely a communications degree of some kind. Right? You said, yeah, it was calm through Cal State Fullerton. It's communications. So you studied, you studied journalism. You wrote a few articles in your time.
You wrote some lead paragraphs. You got your who, what, where, when and why. You maybe took a, you maybe took an ethics class. You did, you took a few journal Law of Mass Communication. All those things. You learned what the rules of the road are and rules of engagement are. And that now.
But what's happened is that for a long time, the folks who are on the other side of that, the other side of the PR people were journalists who went to journalism school and learned the craft and had a set of standards and ethics. And now you have anybody and their brother could be a blogger or write an article, and they don't follow the same rules.
And I had, I dealt with a writer who was covering a situation for one of my clients, and she reached out to me and said, can you give us a comment on. For this story? And I gave her the statement. And she didn't use it at all. And she just didn't. It was a bash hit piece, crazy hit piece. And then she wrote another article and she did it again. She said, will you comment on this? And we gave her a statement. She didn't use it.
And then she's got the gumption or whatever to reach out to me again and say, oh, I'm still following this story, so any help you can give me would be great. And my response is, you haven't done anything. You haven't done it. You haven't been balanced. Why should I? Why. I can't expect you to be balanced, so why would you expect me to help you now? Well, you're not playing by any of the rules that I know of. You're just doing whatever you want. And so there's, that's a, there's a big issue.
And then also there's just this, the misinformation out there in general you know what? There was, there used to be a statement in the journalism world, if your mother says she loves you, check it out. They verify, get sources do all these things. But when the, when you know the. When there's. Everybody has a camera in their pocket and something happens and they can just film it and say, yeah, I just saw this and what did you see?
They get their own man on the street interview, but it's not necessarily backed up. So it's really tricky to communicate these days because you have. The rules of engagement are all over the place. Yeah, obviously everything's built on trust. Mind you, I took the ethics class in college and that was the worst class I ever took. He didn't teach me anything. It was. I was like, why am I here every time? Because it was like, it's up to you guys.
I'm like, I'm like, dude, seriously, there can, there has to be a standard somewhere. Yeah. I think that the. What ends up happening is that in journalism school they teach the concept of sourcing and of that you have to, you have to have legitimate sources of information that you're. That you have to be balanced in your coverage of things. And that's all out the window for somebody who's just decided, okay, tomorrow I'm going to write my own blog and I'm going to write whatever I want.
And I don't. And I don't. I've never. What. Why would I want to be balanced? Because they look at the traditional media outlets, they don't think they're being balanced. They don't think that Fox is balanced, they don't think CNN is balanced. Why should I be balanced? So it's a different, It's a different world. So the way. But back to the original question of how do you prepare?
Is that I, again, I think it's having the framework in place and then being able to triage the situation, understand what's. When you need to. When you need a gentle hand, when you need, when you need to back off or when you need the hammer. And that's, and that's. It's. Again, it's a lot of it's play it the way it based on the way things look at the moment. And also do the facts truly align? Because sometimes you have situations where there's just.
The folks are saying things are happening when they're really not. Then the facts don't back up the accusation. What does the future of crisis come look like? Is it going to be more about the digital crises that are happening? Is it still going to be just unexpected societal changes and upheavals. Because I feel like the last four years there's been so many like unexpected upheavals.
Both man made and both unexpected because it's just been one of those four years where it's just like no PR person could have actually predicted the shutting down of basically almost the whole economy and everything else that associated with that. So where can PR pros plan for the future? I guess is the best way of saying it for this.
I think that the big, I think the main thing is that you have to look at how people are getting their influence information and there's the good news and bad news of the current media landscape. Is the good news is that anybody with a camera or a keyboard can practice some form of journalism. The bad news is that anybody with a camera and a keyboard can practice some form of journalism.
So you have to think what's going to happen is you're gonna have is that you're dealing more with what's happening like on social media. And those are the types of things. Like I think that's where you really have to keep your eye open because that's where folks have the ability to most to in the quickest way make noise. And you see it already. I've seen it for years now. What if somebody gets lousy service at a restaurant, they go on Yelp or they go on Twitter and they make noise.
The. And those generally, those are what I more on the embarrassing side of a crisis. And those are customer service related issues and those are operationally related issues. When something goes to a larger, a larger scale then you have to, you have to treat it differently. But at the same time a lot of people are getting news from like hyper focused Instagram channels. There's one in one here in South Florida that's called we live in Miami, Dade county and it's called Only in Dade.
It's an Instagram channel and it's filled mostly with people doing Florida man type stuff. It's filled with people behaving badly. A lot of that. And then and we had, we had the floods, we had flooding last week. And if you watch the only in date look at the only in Date channel, you'd think that the whole southern half of the peninsula was under underwater, which it wasn't. But it was. There were some places it was really bad. But a lot of people, that's where they're getting their news.
They're getting their news from TikTok, they're getting their news from Instagram So you have to really follow those channels and be aware of what's being posted, because that's where the crisis is probably going to come from. That meaning that's where the communications channel that the crisis is going to come from. All right. It's just a new thing. That's the big difference, I think. Yeah, it's just a new thing that everybody's just going to have to do multiple sources.
When I was, like I said pr, everybody says you have to have multiple sources. You have to read multiple things. I think it's. I do that, but because one person has one perspective. One person, another perspective. But for PR pros, that's what we have to. That's what we have to live with. Like, somebody gets one source and they're like, this is how it is. Like, Florida's underwater. And it's not really underwater, just a portion of it's underwater for a short amount of time.
Yeah. No, I think that there's the thing that you have that the more credible the source, typically, the more likely they are to follow those traditional rules of engagement. So there is a sort of a. There is a continuum there. Even though the daily newspaper is essentially. We called the body on the daily newspaper a few several years ago, the folks who are still writing for those types of outlets traditionally are trying to follow those rules. Right. That you're discussing.
And. And they have more credibility. Except they're just. They have never figured out how to. To monetize and stay alive. And they're. They're shrinking in their. Their footprints are shrinking by the second, but they're still more credible than Joe Instagrammer. But Joe Instagrammer might be the one who's posting all the great videos of the floods and people behaving badly and the alligators and people swimming pools and all that jazz. That gets more viewership. Yeah, it's the drama factor.
That's what really sells on social media. It's the drama. People love drama. Some people love it more than other people, but we all still love a certain amount of drama in our lives. It keeps it interesting. Yeah, no, I think it's. There's the. And that's part of it is that you have sometimes what the. Sometimes that's your big concern, is that you're going to.
Your crisis, you're going through has the ability to become that viral moment or to have that just extraordinary sort of juicy aspect to it, and they. And something that's again, the same reason. The same. If you think in terms of. In the PR business, We're always thinking about, okay, what's our visual? What's this going to look like? What's our. How do we sell this story? It's the same thing. When you're dealing with a crisis, you say, okay, if there's going to be.
If you're dealing with something where it's impacting families or children or puppies or whatever or somebody's holiday, you're in trouble, man. You got, you're going to have a lot of interest in that. The same thing that makes, the same thing that makes something a story sweet can make a story horrible. So you have. So that's all part of it. No. People are listening to this episode and wondering where can they find you online and learn more about what you do in crisis communication?
Sure. My website is davidpr.com again, my name is John David. It's www.davidpr.com and pretty easy to get a hold of through the web. Any final thoughts for listeners? I think the big thing is that you have that preparation is key and speed is important and silence can be deadly. Don't just, don't just no comment it. Get some advice because there's, there's always options that are better than saying nothing.
Or if you really don't know, just say, I'll get back to you later and actually get back to them later. That's that, right? Saying and saying that and actually doing it. Or that's, that's the. You did go to PR school. See, you were there. I could. You went, you did it, you got it, you learned something. I learned a whole bunch, but it was all outdated when I was there because it was social media was up and coming and they just didn't ever talked about it. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
It's. Hopefully they got the foundation because, yeah, it's changed. Everything's changed dramatically. And that's part of the issue, is that how we communicate, it's changing. All right, thank you for joining the podcast and sharing your knowledge on crisis communication and pr. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it and thank you. For listening as always. Please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps of the five star review.
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